A new £35m cancer centre will offer life-saving proton beam therapy in Liverpool.

The centre will form part of the £1bn Paddington Village scheme in the city in an investment that will create more than 100 jobs.

The company behind the project is Proton Partners International - whose boss Mike Moran, an ex-soldier from Liverpool, launched a network of cancer treatment centres after his brother got breast cancer.

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The Rutherford Cancer Centre North West, which will sit behind the Royal Liverpool Hospital on the former Archbishop Blanch School site, could treat hundreds of patients every year. The scheme is being unveiled today to an audience of international investors at the Mipim property festival in Cannes, France.

Image of a new cancer centre which will be built in the £1 billion Paddington Village, part of Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter (KQ). Photo: Proton Partners International/JDDK Architects (Image: Handout)

Mr Moran, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, learned about proton beam therapy when his brother Tony fell ill with breast cancer.

The treatment hit the international headlines in 2014 when the parents of Ashya King, five, sparked an international manhunt when they took him out of the country without doctors’ permission for proton beam therapy treatment.

The treatment is a highly-targeted form of radiotherapy that can treat hard-to-reach cancers with fewer side effects or damage to nearby tissue.

Mike, who was born in Walton, discovered that PBT could have treated his brother with fewer side effects. And he vowed to open such centres across the country

Now he hopes to have the Liverpool centre open next year offering radiotherapy, chemotherapy and imaging services. And the first proton beam therapy will be offered in 2019.

Proton Partners is also opening a research centre nearby, meaning he will create up to 150 highly-skilled jobs.

The treatment will be available through the NHS as well as to private patients.

Mr Moran said: “It’s fantastic. To bring a project of this scale to my home city is an incredible feeling. We’re creating something special, and it’s a special place.”

The new centre will sit in Paddington Village next to the new Northern home of the Royal College of Physicians and the new home of Liverpool International College.

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Liverpool council wants Paddington Village to become a hub of scientific research, employing thousands of people.

Mr Moran left the forces in 2001 and has been running businesses ever since.

But in 2014, his brother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Only around one on every 100,000 men a year in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer, which is much more common among women.

He wanted to find out more about treatments and the implications. So he spoke to world-leading experts, including Dr Karel Sikora, and discovered that proton beam therapy would have been “ideal” for his brother.

He said: “It would have been quicker, with fewer side effects.”

Image of a new cancer centre which will be built in the £1 billion Paddington Village, part of Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter (KQ). Photo: Proton Partners International/JDDK Architects (Image: Handout)

“It’s about investment, it’s about jobs, and it’s about providing new forms of therapy that are cutting-edge. But it’s also about creating one of the most significant clusters of health activity in the UK in Paddington Village as part of the Knowledge Quarter.

“It gives further confirmation that the city, in terms of its reputation for medical science and scientific advancement, is right up there with some of the best not only in the country but in the world.”

Exclusive: Why the Liverpool proton beam centre will be so massive

At the heart of the new Liverpool centre will be a small treatment room - but the building that houses it will be three storeys high.

The ECHO was given an exclusive tour of an existing proton beam therapy centre in Nice to see the scale of the planned Liverpool project.

At the Centre Antoine Lacassagne, the patient only sees a treatment room, where they lie on a bed on a robotic arm so they can receive the treatment.

But that room actually sits in the middle of a three-storey concrete structure filled with tonnes of metalwork and 3ft-thick concrete walls.

So while the patient lies still, tonnes of equipment moves around, above and below them, ensuring the proton beams are fired at the right place.

The powerful cyclotron that creates the beams is enclosed within concrete walls 3m thick. The beams are then fired and directed with powerful magnets.

Image of a new cancer centre planned for Liverpool. To be known as Rutherford Cancer Centre North West, it will offer radiotherapy, chemotherapy and imaging from 2018. Photo: Proton IBA (Image: Handout)

Why proton beam therapy could help Mersey cancer patients

Prof Karel Sikora, one of the world’s leading experts in proton beam therapy and chief medical officer of Proton Partners, said the treatment caused fewer side effects than conventional radiotherapy.

He said: “The main attraction of proton therapy compared to normal radiotherapy is that protons are particles that stop at a defined point because you can control where it stops. Beyond where the tissue is, there’s no radiation.

“If there are critical normal tissues, one can just take the dose to the cancer-affected tissue.”

That means, Prof Sikora said, that you can minimise damage to nearby tissue - something that is particularly important if tumours are in sensitive places.

“When treating the spinal cord and the brain,” he said, “you are very close to some normal tissue.

“About 10% of patients receiving radiotherapy would have many less side effects if they had proton therapy. The question is identifying the 10%.”

And he added: “If you accept the 10% figure, which most European countries use, then the UK needs 18 of these centres.”

Mike Moran has his own explanation.

He says: “I’m just a simple soldier. In simple terms, it’s not about how many doses of radiation a cell gets. It’s about how many cells get a dose.”